Vietnamese care trainees stranded in Thuringia

Germany’s much-advertised solution to its care-worker shortage — recruiting trainees from abroad — is producing an outcome: bureaucratic dependency, legal limbo, and people treated as logistics units. Der Spiegel reports on Vietnamese nursing-care trainees brought to Thuringia who ended up unemployed and facing demands to leave, after administrative and employer-side failures left them without the conditions needed to continue training and work.

The pitch is simple. Germany’s aging population and regulated care sector need staff; Vietnam has young workers willing to train; intermediaries and local authorities promise a pipeline. This is central planning with better branding. Multiple actors — recruitment agencies, employers, vocational schools, immigration offices, and municipal administrators — must deliver in sequence: contracts, housing, language support, licensing recognition, and compliant training placements. When any link fails, the trainee bears the downside.

What Der Spiegel describes is not merely “bad luck” but an asymmetry. Trainees arrive tied to a specific employer and a specific legal status. If the employer cannot provide the promised training slot, supervision, hours, or paperwork, the trainee cannot simply switch jobs like a normal worker in a functioning labor market. Their residence status becomes contingent on a process they do not control, while rent and living costs continue. Dependency is engineered into the system.

This is the predictable result of trying to solve a labor-market problem with a cartelized sector and a paperwork-driven migration regime. Germany restricts entry, channels migrants into narrow categories, then acts surprised when intermediaries gain power over workers’ lives. The “trainee” model also conveniently suppresses wages: importing people into a training status delays full labor-market bargaining while still extracting labor.

The critique here is not anti-immigration; it is anti-permission. If Germany wants care workers, it could liberalize licensing pathways, allow faster job mobility across employers, and reduce the number of state-sanctioned chokepoints where agencies and officials can trap people in compliance loops. Instead, it manufactures a dependency chain and calls it workforce policy.

When the system breaks — as it did in Thuringia — the human beings at the end of the chain are told to pack their bags. The planners keep their programs, their budgets, and their press releases.